Three statements...

An interesting challenge set in HCJ this week; to find out what is important about three individual statements and blog about them.

'The evening star is the same thing as the morning star'

This relates to the work of a German logician, mathematician and philosopher called Gottlob Frege, who wanted to give an example of the difference between 'reference' and 'sense' in logic.

Please consider the statements below:

1.  The morning star = the morning star.

2.  The morning star = the evening star.

As you may or may not know, both the 'morning star' and the 'evening star' refer to the planet Venus.  However, the first statement appears superfluous, while the second appears to be giving additional information to the reader.  Frege argues that both statements are equally true, but because the referenced object in each component expression of both statements is identical (the planet Venus) the sense of the component expressions are what determines the informativeness of each statement.  Thus statement 1 seems distinctly unhelpful, while statement 2 provides the reader with additional information.

'The present king of France is not bald'

This was a logical problem set by Bertrand Russell who intended to build upon the work done by Frege.

Western logic is binary in nature, that is, it only allows for two states:  'true' or 'false'.

Russell argues that if a statement such as 'The present king of France is bald.' is examined, it can be split into three separate assertions:

1.  That there is an x, where x is a present king of France
2.  For every x that is a present king of France, and every y that is a present king of France, x = y (i.e. there can only be one present King of France at most)
3.  For every x that is a present king of France, x is bald.

Given that France is a republic, and as such does not have a king, the statement is provably false, as the first assertion is clearly false.  Now consider the following statement:

'The present king of France is not bald'

This second statement is a negation of the first statement, but logically it presents some problems.

This is due to the ambiguity present in the negation.  If you read this statement as saying 'the present king of France is not bald, because there is no present king of France', the statement is true.

However, if you were mistakenly under the impression that France currently had a king, then the negation could, in logical terms, mean 'there is something that is the present king of France, and it is the only present king of France, and that present king of France is not bald.'

Read in the latter manner, the statement is logically false.  One of the primary laws of logic are that a statement can only be 'true' or 'false'.  Yet 'The present king of France is not bald' appears to be both....


There was nobody on the road

I couldn't find this precise phrase discussed directly, but am choosing to believe (possibly incorrectly) that Chris was paraphrasing from Chapter 7 of Lewis Carroll's famous work 'Through the Looking Glass'.

Specifically:

`I see nobody on the road,' said Alice.
`I only wish I had such eyes,' the King remarked in a fretful tone. `To be able to see Nobody! And at that distance, too! Why, it's as much as I can do to see real people, by this light!' 

There is a logical absurdity in the idea of being able to see nobody, which is hopefully visible to all!  

Freud and psychoanalysis

Sigmund Freud was born on May 6 1856 in a place called Freiberg that was at that time part of the Austrian Empire.  His interest to the world is mainly in the field of psychoanalysis, which he pioneered and championed throughout his life.

Freud looked at a person's mind as being composed of three parts (in a similar way to Plato's Tripartite Theory of the Soul)  with the mind being split into:

Id (our 'animal' brain, made up of base desires)
Ego (the rational part of our minds)
Super-Ego (our internal policeman, that perpetually berates us for our actions or inaction)

Freud was a pessimist, and believed that the Ego was hopelessly out-gunned by the Id and the Super-Ego.  He believed that only by psychoanalysis could the Ego be helped to hold its own against this two-pronged attack.

However, Plato argued that the soul was split into Appetitive, Rational and Spirited parts, and that it was possible for the rational part of the mind to control the more appetitive and spirited parts of the mind.

At the time of Freud's work becoming available, it was considered ground-breaking and exciting, Freud gained a great deal of popularity and his work was initially widely accepted with little criticism.  It was only after careful study that criticisms of his work began to surface, in some cases among former students who had previously followed him avidly.

Freud is not held in such high regard today.  It was found upon attempting to repeat his techniques, that the results of some of his case studies may have been falsified, and that psychoanalysis does not, in fact, offer the benefits suggested by Freud.

In addition, Freud's attitude to, and explanations of, female sexuality are without merit, except as an example of misogyny at work.

Freud's concepts of the Id, Ego and SuperEgo remain popular and widely used today, but his views on sexuality generally, and female sexuality in particular, have been dis-proven as conjecture.  In reading his work today, you'd be forgiven for suggesting he should see a therapist...

Citizen Kane

In the HCJ lecture on 29th of October, we were introduced to modernism.  Modernism marked a move away from the passion and fervour of the Romantic period and back towards a scientific world view that was similar in some respects to the enlightenment.  However, modernism, as the name suggests, was concerned mainly with 'newness'.  Modernism sought to eradicate unnecessary tradition and was obsessed with finding new ways of creating and interpreting art, literature and the world around us.

Modernism was the age of Nietzsche and Freud, of Joyce in literature, and of Wagner in music.

During this period, an American press baron (one of the first of the modern type) grew to prominence in the United States.  His name was William Randolph Hearst, and his life formed the starting point for the screenplay that became Citizen Kane.  As such, although it is possible to view Citizen Kane as simply a well-written motion picture, the viewer should be aware that they are watching a thinly disguised biography of the life of one of the first press barons ever to grace America.  It is interesting to note how 'proactive' the tabloid press became under Hearst's leadership, when it came to getting news stories.